Investigating the patterns and processes that determine the geographic distributions of organisms is a central goal of ecology and evolutionary biology, and an understanding of these processes is essential for scientists to predict how species ranges will respond to environmental change. This study uses modern ecoinformatic databases and spatially-explicit species distributional modeling to resolve important relationships between the environment and stress. The work will include measuring physiological stress in ways that are well established in biomedical research, but until now have not been applied to natural populations within an explicit geographic context. Measures of genetic variability (e.g., inbreeding and heterozygosity) will also be measured, as previous work has shown that populations at the edge of the species range have reduced genetic variability that is associated with lower quality habitats and reduced ability to survive or adapt to changes in environmental conditions. Thus, this project will be one of the first to unify physiological, genetic, and environmental assessments of stress in wild populations. While positive correlations among risk of population extinction, inbreeding and isolation, and physiological stress are widely assumed, direct comparisons among these ecological, genetic, and physiological measures of fitness have never been directly compared. The research focuses on the wood frog as a model system because amphibians are sensitive to environmental change, and they are the most threatened group of vertebrates on the planet. The result will be a statistical assessment of the relationship between environmental quality and stress across geographic space within the range of the wood frog. The goal is to provide a toolkit of fitness indicators for conservation biologists and biogeographers to use when predicting the geography of population health to make better predictions about whether populations will persist given the threats of climate change or habitat destruction.
This project aims to ground-truth a new technique that may become a useful tool in conservation biology to help assess population health and sub-lethal environmental stress in amphibians. This project provides the first integration of environmental endocrinology, population genetics, and spatially-explicit distributional modeling in a landscape-level stress assessment. This research will also enhance the education of both undergraduate and graduate students and train them to be integrative biologists who can use powerful bioinformatics databases to design studies and ask important conservation questions. Finally, in addition to research publications, presentations, and adding museum specimens to a natural history collection, a workshop on the Biogeography of Stress will be conducted to bring together research scientists, conservation biologists, and students to enhance dissemination of findings and synthesis of future directions in this field.
